Two Major Issues to Face in Middle Adulthood

What are two major issues people face in middle adulthood and how are they different from the issues people face as young adults?

Two major issues that face people in middle adulthood are generally marriage, the starting of a family and the establishment of one’s identity often largely attached to a stable career. Erik Erikson explained these two major issues faced in middle adulthood as the explains: “Two basic aspects of our lives dominate adulthood. Erik Erikson called them intimacy (forming close relationships) and generativity (being productive and supporting future generations).” (Meyers) In middle adulthood most people in modern western culture begin to establish a family through marriage and having children, which coincides not only with biological clocks later end of reproductive deterioration, especially in the case of women but also with the stages of mental and emotional development. Since at this stage of development in life an adult has a far less impulsive decision making process and a more mature mentality they are more apt and better prepared to face these major two issues. It is also noted in our text that :”Researchers have chosen various terms—affiliation and achievement, attachment and productivity, connectedness and competence. Sigmund Freud (1935) put it most simply: The healthy adult, he said, is one who can love and work.” (Meyers) This echoes Erikson’s sediments and by breaking down two of the most formidable issues that shape one’s life in middle adulthood into to work and love as Freud and out text do we can better examine who they are involved in middle adulthood. While in modern times young adults are taking more time to focus on education and taking longer periods to establish finical independen...

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...d accomplishment.” (Meyers) The text also speaks to the difference between self-identity and self-esteem between the two stages saying that:” From the teens to midlife, people typically experience a strengthening sense of identity, confidence, and self – esteem” (Meyers)

The overall difference seen between the stages of young adult to middle adulthood and how it effects the issues of love and work is that in the transition to middle adulthood everything becomes more well defined through not only physiological developments but by the values of experience and time to gain and apply education to both of these progressions allowing us to evole our lives further as a whole from that which we knew of life at a younger age .

Works Cited

Meyers, David G. Phsychology 1oth edition. New York, NY 10010: Worth Publishers, 2011. text book.